Commit c32064785ad77722a76437f7d0826f063158d3f2

Authored by Shaohua Li
Committed by Jiri Slaby
1 parent b25fd5de48

x86/mm: In the PTE swapout page reclaim case clear the accessed bit instead of flushing the TLB

commit b13b1d2d8692b437203de7a404c6b809d2cc4d99 upstream.

We use the accessed bit to age a page at page reclaim time,
and currently we also flush the TLB when doing so.

But in some workloads TLB flush overhead is very heavy. In my
simple multithreaded app with a lot of swap to several pcie
SSDs, removing the tlb flush gives about 20% ~ 30% swapout
speedup.

Fortunately just removing the TLB flush is a valid optimization:
on x86 CPUs, clearing the accessed bit without a TLB flush
doesn't cause data corruption.

It could cause incorrect page aging and the (mistaken) reclaim of
hot pages, but the chance of that should be relatively low.

So as a performance optimization don't flush the TLB when
clearing the accessed bit, it will eventually be flushed by
a context switch or a VM operation anyway. [ In the rare
event of it not getting flushed for a long time the delay
shouldn't really matter because there's no real memory
pressure for swapout to react to. ]

Suggested-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Shaohua Li <shli@fusionio.com>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Acked-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: linux-mm@kvack.org
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20140408075809.GA1764@kernel.org
[ Rewrote the changelog and the code comments. ]
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Jiri Slaby <jslaby@suse.cz>

Showing 1 changed file with 14 additions and 7 deletions Side-by-side Diff

arch/x86/mm/pgtable.c
... ... @@ -386,13 +386,20 @@
386 386 int ptep_clear_flush_young(struct vm_area_struct *vma,
387 387 unsigned long address, pte_t *ptep)
388 388 {
389   - int young;
390   -
391   - young = ptep_test_and_clear_young(vma, address, ptep);
392   - if (young)
393   - flush_tlb_page(vma, address);
394   -
395   - return young;
  389 + /*
  390 + * On x86 CPUs, clearing the accessed bit without a TLB flush
  391 + * doesn't cause data corruption. [ It could cause incorrect
  392 + * page aging and the (mistaken) reclaim of hot pages, but the
  393 + * chance of that should be relatively low. ]
  394 + *
  395 + * So as a performance optimization don't flush the TLB when
  396 + * clearing the accessed bit, it will eventually be flushed by
  397 + * a context switch or a VM operation anyway. [ In the rare
  398 + * event of it not getting flushed for a long time the delay
  399 + * shouldn't really matter because there's no real memory
  400 + * pressure for swapout to react to. ]
  401 + */
  402 + return ptep_test_and_clear_young(vma, address, ptep);
396 403 }
397 404  
398 405 #ifdef CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE